Looking back: Daniel Callahan
        
            By Michael Cook, 
                BioEdge
             | 06. 13. 2015
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
             
  Untitled Document 
  
The dominant view of bioethics frames issues in terms of autonomy and individual rights. A retrospective in the Cambridge Quarterly of Heathcare Ethics,   by Daniel Callahan, one of the grand old men of American bioethics, is a   reminder of a broader and more communitarian view of the discipline.
 
  Callahan is a restless thinker who did his undergraduate study at   Yale and his PhD at Harvard. But the academic life did not suit him and   he turned to journalism and for several years edited Commonweal, an   influential Catholic journal. After splitting with the Church over   abortion, in 1969 he co-founded The Hastings Center, a leading bioethics   think tank.
 
  Here are a few paragraphs:
 
   
    I became known as an autonomy-basher, not   because I objected to autonomy as an important human value but because I   objected to an undercurrent trend that seemed to reduce ethics itself   to nothing but individual free choice disconnected from an even more   important question: what counts as a good or bad choice, a good or bad   person, or a good or bad society? Those questions...
 
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
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